Wed, 5 May 2010
![]() Corporations – and President Obama – are
betting that hunger for jobs will trump all else to make Blacks allies
of nuclear power. Nuclear energy promoters worked on the same assumption
30 years ago – but that was before the blossoming of the environmental
justice movement.
![]() The
Jobs Scam: Selling Blacks on Nuclear Power
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“Nuclear power
corporations to believe that Blacks will be far more enthusiastic than
whites about any industrial scheme that holds out the hope
of jobs.”
The nuclear power industry will soon launch a
major propaganda campaign in Black America, hyping atomic energy as a
jobs program. I’ve seen it all before, up close, more than 30 years ago,
when the Westinghouse Corporation became a regular advertiser on the
syndicated television news interview program I co-owned and hosted,
America’s Black Forum. That was back in 1978, a year before the
near-meltdown at Three Mile Island. The Pittsburgh-based nuclear power
corporation had just completed a study that showed African Americans
were more interested in jobs, and less concerned about environmental
issues, than whites. Westinghouse’s executives figured that jobs-hungry
Black folks would serve as a counter-point to the long-haired white kids
and tree-huggers that the media caricatured as the core of the
environmental movement. We should note that the data in Westinghouse’s
survey did not say that Blacks were
friendlier to nuclear power than whites – only that they cared more
about jobs, as a logical consequence of having fewer of them. The idea
was to convince Blacks that nukes = jobs, and that words like
“environment” and “ecology” had nothing to do with them. So, with great
hopes of political success, Westinghouse bought advertising - lots of
it – on my show and other Black-oriented media around the country.
1978 was also the year that the modern
environmental justice movement began, under the godfathership of Dr. Robert Bullard, a Black environmental
sociologist who was documenting how America dumps its industrial and
other unwanted wastes disproportionately in Black neighborhoods. Dr.
Bullard’s data provided the objective evidence that proved the crucial
link between environmental issues and social justice.
“Westinghouse’s
executives figured that jobs-hungry Black folks would serve as a
counter-point to the long-haired white kids and tree-huggers that the
media caricatured as the core of the environmental movement.”
As far as Dr. Bullard is concerned, the
racial politics of nuclear power is no different than the politics of
other industrial hazards; it’s easier to dump them in Black
neighborhoods. And now, as
thirty years ago, Black unemployment remains
roughly twice the rate of whites, leading nuclear power corporations to
believe that Blacks will be far more enthusiastic than whites about any industrial scheme that holds
out the hope of jobs.
With President Obama's blessing and more than
$8 billion dollars in guaranteed public money, the nuclear power folks
plan to build two new plants in majority Black and desperately poor
Burke County, Georgia, where cancer rates are far higher than
surrounding regions and jobs are still scarce for Blacks even though
nuclear plants have been located there since the 1950s. In an article in
the Huffington Post, Dr. Robert Bullard told Black
Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon that Black communities on the fencelines of
nuclear plants “don't get the jobs. They get pollution and more poverty. And they
get sick.”
But corporate promoters are already
re-revving their propaganda machines to sell Blacks on nuclear power
with the same jobs-creation argument they pushed three decades ago.
Nuclear companies have been flying Black and brown delegations to visit
happy neighborhoods around power plants in France. The Black press is onboard, too, because that's where the
advertising dollars are, and because the Black president says that
nukes mean jobs. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go
to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR
executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Direct download: 20100505_gf_BlackNukes.mp3
Category:nukes, environmental racism -- posted at: 9:50am EDT |